Contract Manufacturing | 上海證券交易所, 8 June 2018 — The Foxconn That Listed Here Does Not Build iPhones

The company that listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on 8 June 2018 was called Foxconn, and it did not assemble a single phone. Foxconn Industrial Internet, 富士康工業互聯網, shortened on the tape to 工業富聯 and traded as 601138, is a separately listed subsidiary of Hon Hai (鴻海精密工業). Its business is telecommunications and network equipment, cloud service hardware, precision tooling and industrial robots. Final assembly of consumer devices stayed with the parent company. The distinction matters more than it sounds, because coverage of the group merges the two sets of figures constantly. They are different balance sheets with different customers. Getting to this address was fast in a way that made the listing famous at home. The company filed its prospectus on 1 February 2018 and cleared the China Securities Regulatory Commission's issuance review committee on 8 March, thirty-six days later. An A-share approval normally takes months, sometimes years. Regulators had opened a fast lane for cloud computing, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing, and this was the company that went through it. The sale was the largest on the mainland in about three years: 1.97 billion shares at ¥13.77, raising ¥27.1 billion, roughly US$4.3 billion. Retail investors bid 294 times the tranche set aside for them. On the first day the stock rose the 44 per cent daily limit and closed near ¥19.8, worth about ¥390 billion. That afternoon it was the most valuable technology company listed on the A-share market. A Taiwanese contract manufacturer had spent thirty years building the mainland's export industry out of 深圳. In 2018 it floated the industrial half of that operation in Shanghai as a Chinese technology company, and the state held the door open. The exchange is at 浦東南路528號 in 陸家嘴, and the building in the photograph is the one you can stand under: a squat tower carrying its floors on an exterior frame, with a rectangular void punched through the middle. There is nothing to watch inside. Trading is electronic, the floor is closed to visitors, and the thing worth knowing here is which Foxconn the ticker refers to. Photo: Baycrest, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.